Overview:
Smith College professor Carrie Baker spoke at the Whately Civic Association Speaker series about Project 2025, a 922-page federal policy agenda she described as a "misogynist manifesto" that targets women's rights, including the elimination of abortion, restricting contraception access and erasing workplace gender discrimination protections.
WHATELY — Smith College professor Carrie Baker broke down the Trump administration’s progress on Project 2025, or a “misogynist manifesto,” as she described, during a recent town hall.
About 45 attendees gathered in Whately Town Hall for the second event in the Whately Civic Association Speaker series, conversations tracking the Trump administration’s “current transformation of our federal government and how we, the citizens, can best respond,” according to the event’s organizers.
With around 25 years of experience in teaching women’s rights law, Baker also is the chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College and a frequent writer for Ms. Magazine.
Baker told listeners that she has tracked the evolution of women’s rights since teaching her first class in 2001, a trajectory with an upward slant until now.
“It’s never a straight line forward, but it was a general line forward over the last 25 years,” Baker said. “And now, we’re just falling off the cliff.”
Baker explained the inception and content of Project 2025, a 922-page federal policy agenda for restructuring the federal government to advance conservative goals. In Baker’s words, the plan, published in April of 2023, is a “Christian nationalist document” aimed to “dismantle civil rights infrastructure.”
Although Baker said many goals guide the blueprint, she decided to focus on its ideas for gnawing at women’s rights, because, “misogyny is at the very core of Project 2025.”
She then outlined Project 2025’s target areas for women’s rights, including “shoring up ‘biblically based’ heterosexual marriage and procreation,” eliminating abortion, restricting contraception access, destroying supportive programs for low-income and single mothers and erasing workplace gender discrimination protections, and Title IX protections against sexual harassment and assault and LGBTQ rights.
“They want the patriarchal family back,” Baker explained, referring to the Heritage Foundation and the over 100 conservative organizations behind Project 2025. To trace her claims about the document, Baker read several quotes from Project 2025.
“For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father,” Baker read from page 481 of Project 2025. “Married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them,” Baker continued, reading from page 489 of the plan.
Baker added that the blueprint also demands that the “next conservative president” delete terms like “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender,” “gender equality” and “reproductive health” from federal rules, agency regulations, contracts, grants and legislation.
“You may think I’m caricaturing this report,” Baker said. “Go read it yourself, it truly is bizarre … it’s off the deep end.”
Baker then explained the Trump Administration’s moves to put this plan into action, claiming 121 of the plan’s 312 objecties have already been completed, including narrowing the applicability of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender and other categories, stopping wage gap research and enforcement, rescinding guidance requiring hospitals to perform life-saving abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act and cutting Medicaid for states like Massachusetts that allocate funding for Planned Parenthood.
“Across the nation, Planned Parenthoods are closing down, and often, they are the only health care in communities, so they are turning communities into health care deserts,” Baker said.
She described the collision of abortion bans and the Trump administration’s plans to block access to contraception as “pronatalism in the era of Trump.” Pronatalism refers to the philosophy promoting high birth rates.
To end her presentation, Baker shared the story she explores in her book, “Abortion Pills,” about activists committed to distributing abortion pills, whether through underground methods or out in the open with the help of virtual doctors visits.
“There’s an intense movement where determined, courageous and creative activists said, ‘No, no way,’ and figured out a way to get abortion pills into people’s hands,” Baker explained.
For Baker, these movements of grassroots resistance, including protests big and small across the country where individuals toss aside the typical playbook and channel their anger into action, encourages her.
“Like Whately Civic!” Joyce Palmer-Fortune of Whately hollered.
“I think there’s enough empowered Americans where maybe we can turn this around, but we all need to be working hard,” Baker said. “We need to work across our differences and be OK with our differences.”
“This fight has just begun,” she said.
After the presentation, attendee Terry Caldwell said she is angered by “the whole 2025 agenda.” She claimed that Project 2025 aims to bring women back to the 1950s. “I’m not going to be quiet,” she insisted.